A Standing Spherical garden That Empowers People to Grow Their Own Food

A Standing Spherical garden That Empowers People to Grow Their Own Food

SPACE10 envision a future, where we grow our own food much more locally. To spark conversations about how we can bring nature back into our cities, grow our own food and tackle the rapidly increasing demand for significantly more food in the future, we teamed up with architects Sine Lindholm and Mads-Ulrik Husum to create The Growroom. Standing tall as a spherical garden, it empowers people to grow their own food much more locally in a beautiful and sustainable way.

From Taipei to Helsinki and from Rio de Janeiro to San Francisco, the original version of The Growroom sparked interest and people requested to either buy or exhibit The Growroom. But it doesn’t make sense to promote local food production and then start shipping it across oceans and continents. That is why we now release The Growroom as open source design and encourage people to build their own locally as a way to bring new opportunities to life.

Easy as 1, 2, 3

Digital fabrication has made state-of-the-art factory tools accessible for ordinary people. A new generation of technologies such as 3D additive and subtractive manufacturing to laser cutting and surface-mount manufacture is available to the public in fab labs and maker spaces in any major city.

This mean most people — in theory — could produce almost anything themselves. Just as printers are now ubiquitous; local and on-demand, customised production could become the norm of the future. We’re tapping into this emerging potential by releasing the cutting files for The Growroom. All you then need to build it, is two rubber hammers, 17 sheets of ply wood and a visit your local fab lab or maker space with a CNC milling machine. The design focuses on making the assembly easy and intuitive for anyone to handle, and The Growroom is produced from only one material, making it accessible and affordable for most communities.

The original Growroom exhibited at CHART ART FAIR. Photo by Rasmus Hjortshøj

Designed for cities

Local food represents a serious alternative to the global food model. It reduces food miles, our pressure on the environment, and educates our children of where food actually comes from. The result on the dining table is just as fascinating. We could produce food of the highest quality that tastes better, is much more nutritional, fresh, organic and healthy.

The challenge is that traditional farming take up a lot of space and space is a scarce resource in our urban environments.

The Growroom is designed for cities and with it’s size, 2,8 x 2,5 meter, it has a small spatial footprint as you grow vertically. It is designed to support our everyday sense of well being in the cities by creating a small oasis or ‘pause’-architecture in our high paced societal scenery, and enables people to connect with nature as we smell and taste the abundance of herbs and plants. The pavilion, built as a sphere, can stand freely in any context and points in a direction of expanding contemporary and shared architecture.

The overlapping slices ensure that water and light can reach the vegetation on each level, without reaching the visitor within and thereby functions as a growth activator for the vegetation and shelter for the visitor.

Build your own Growroom

You can build your own Growroom in 17 easy steps. Find the instructions below and download the cutting files for free right here.

Please give us a nudge on Instagram: @space10_journal + #SPACE10Growroom if you build your own Growroom or shoot us an email on discover@space10.io. We would love to celebrate your version.

The Growroom have a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International Public License, which means that the design can be shared, copied and build upon without asking permission. The only condition is that you credit the original work to SPACE10 and architects Mads-Ulrik Husum and Sine Lindholm, throw in a link and indicate if any changes have been made.

Good luck!

Getting started

The parts you need to build The Growroom. Photo by Niklas Vindelev

To get going building The Growroom, there are certain elements that needs to be ready and available:

CNC cutting files

Download the CNC cutting files here and share with your local fab lab or maker space that can cut the pieces for you.

Materials

13 sheets of plywood: 2440mm x 1220mm x 18mm

4 sheets of plywood: 2440mm x 1220mm x 4mm

500 stainless pan head screws: 3.5mm x 30mm

Remember to treat the plywood before you put soil and plants in.

Machinery

CNC machine with a cutter, 8mm in diameter. Alternatively, the Growroom can be cut out on a laser cutter — (fab labs and maker spaces with a CNC milling machine that are open to the public can be found in most major cities).

Table saw

Tools

Screwdriver

Appropriate bit for the screws

Drill, 2mm in diameter

2 hammers

The Growroom is produced in only one material, and is put together with hammers, or whatever hard object you have lying around, that can be used for knocking the chisels in place.

We’ll get back to that.

On the edge of each level, the thin plywood is mounted with the use of the screws.

We will also get back to that.

We hope you will enjoy building and using The Growroom.

Cnc-milled parts

Drawings by Sine Lindholm & Mads Ulrik Husum

Photos by Niklas Vindelev

Step 1

Drawing by Sine Lindholm and Mads-Ulrik Husum

Step 2

Drawing by Sine Lindholm and Mads-Ulrik Husum

The support pieces are put in place in the vertical A boards as shown in STEP 1. The vertical A boards with the attached supported pieces, are placed into every second slot in the Big A circle. Notice that the slot has small holes to one or both sides.

Photos by Niklas Vindelev

Step 3

Drawing by Sine Lindholm and Mads-Ulrik Husum

The chisels are knocked into place under the bottom as illustrated above. Keep knocking the chisels with the hammers from both sides until they are completely fastened.

Photos by Niklas Vindelev

Step 4

Drawing by Sine Lindholm and Mads-Ulrik Husum

The shoes are placed under each vertical A board with chisels inside it. The 4 shoes provide the foundation of the pavilion, so the pavilion won’t stand grinding on the edge of the vertical A’s.

Photos by Niklas Vindelev

Step 5

Drawing by Sine Lindholm and Mads-Ulrik Husum

The vertical A1 boards are put into the remaining slots of the floor.

Step 6

Drawing by Sine Lindholm and Mads-Ulrik Husum

Horizontal B1-B4 are now mounted on top of the vertical As with the attached support beams and the vertical A1s. Make sure that the opening is as depicted above, where there are no support beams.

Photos by Niklas Vindelev

Step 7.1

Drawing by Sine Lindholm and Mads-Ulrik Husum

Vertical B is put into the slots of horizontal B1-B4 and slided to the side onto the part of the vertical A board that is sticking through.

Step 7.2

Drawing by Sine Lindholm and Mads-Ulrik Husum

Two chisels are knocked into the slots as depicted above, aligning the 2 vertical elements.

Step 7.3

Drawing by Sine Lindholm and Mads-Ulrik Husum

The chisels are positioned loosely in the slots first below and then above B1-B4 as depicted above. Once the chisels are positioned as depicted, they are knocked into place with two hammers from both sides simultaneously.

Step 8

Drawing by Sine Lindholm and Mads-Ulrik Husum

You should now have successfully mounted the layer B of your pavillon as depicted above. In order to finish the pavillon, repeat Step 6–7 for the remaining layers: C,D,E,F,G

Photos by Niklas Vindelev

You have now finished the pavilion, and are ready to head on to mounting the edging strips.

Step 9

Drawing by Sine Lindholm and Mads-Ulrik Husum

Step 10

Drawing by Sine Lindholm and Mads-Ulrik Husum

Step 11

Drawing by Sine Lindholm and Mads-Ulrik Husum

Step 12

Drawing by Sine Lindholm and Mads-Ulrik Husum

Step 13

Drawing by Sine Lindholm and Mads-Ulrik Husum

Step 14

Drawing by Sine Lindholm and Mads-Ulrik Husum

Step 15

Drawing by Sine Lindholm and Mads-Ulrik Husum

Step 16

Drawing by Sine Lindholm and Mads-Ulrik Husum

Step 17

Drawing by Sine Lindholm and Mads-Ulrik Husum

Edging strips

Drawing by Sine Lindholm and Mads-Ulrik Husum

The 4mm plywood is cut up on the table saw as depicted above. This results in edging strips with a length of 1220mm. The edging strips are suggested cut per 100mm.

Drawing by Sine Lindholm and Mads-Ulrik Husum

Since the geometry of the pavilion isn’t equivalent to the dimensions of plywood, each level has strips cut up in various lengths, as depicted in the table here.

Drawing by Sine Lindholm and Mads-Ulrik Husum

The edging strips are 100 mm strips cut from plywood board measuring 1220mm x 100mm, with small add ons where needed. As you can see, the edging strips are mounted separately to the edge of the pavilion, placed directly next to each other.

When mounting the edging strips, it is important to position the band, so that the top of the band touches or aligns with the detail of the vertical boards, as depicted above.

Thereby you get divided spaces on most levels to contain the soil and plants, which is 70mm high. Below the edging strips becomes room for LED strip light if wanted. The arrows shows where to place the screws.

Drawing by Sine Lindholm and Mads-Ulrik Husum

The edging strips are placed as depicted above in the section drawing. As you see they are always placed where the vertical boards has an indentation or the opposite. Be aware that the edging strips on groundlevel (Horisontal A) has a gap as big as the entrance, so the edging strips should be placed so they aligns with the above levels in terms of the entrance gap.

Drawing by Sine Lindholm and Mads-Ulrik Husum

When mounting the edging strips, it is important to position the band, so that the top of the band touches or aligns with the detail of the vertical boards, as depicted above. Thereby you get divided spaces on most levels to contain the soil and plants, which is 70mm high.

Below the edging strips becomes room for LED strip light if wanted. The arrows shows where to place the screws.

Drawing by Sine Lindholm and Mads-Ulrik Husum

Depicted above, you see the little element, that is in the slot of the vertical B boards. This element is mounted from each side of B. On the element the edging strips are screw in ( B-inside), from the inside. The length of the strip, as described on page 18, assures that the edging strip gets the proper circular curvature.

Drawing by Sine Lindholm and Mads-Ulrik Husum

In this diagram an LED-strip is depicted, mounted on the bottom of the edging strip. This allows for an invisible and safe lighting of the pavillon, similar to the what is found on the original Growroom. The LED-strip can be mounted the same on all the levels.

Drawing by Sine Lindholm and Mads-Ulrik Husum

The Pavilion is done, and you can start filling in the soil and plants on level C,D,E,F,G. To have a better control of the soil and water, you can advantageously put plastic in each space, so that it covers the whole area before you put soil and plants in it.

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